In recent years, the incidence of diabetes has increased year by year in patients and one of the common conditions of diabetes is diabetic foot, which is a serious chronic complication. One of the main causes for diabetic foot are lesions of the sensory nerve, motor nerve and peripheral arterial blood vessels. Diabetic foot causes the foot tissue to become necrotic due to the lack of blood circulation and may even require amputation of the foot in severe cases.
Symptoms of diabetic lesions of motor nerves are mainly on the peripheral nerves. The more severe condition could lead to loss of feeling in a patient's foot, such that that the sense protection function of that foot would be lost, which may be a cause of diabetic foot ulcers.
Diabetes patients are often unable to properly detect abnormal limbs, and many patients even lose their sense protection function in their foot, meaning that they perceive their peripheral circulation to be normal when it is abnormal.
Therefore, medical staff cannot diagnose whether diabetes patients are losing their sense protection function in their foot merely by asking the patient, instead medical staff often use a mechanical tuning fork to test the vibration perception of their foot.
When testing, a patient is asked to close their eyes, while the medical staff knocks the mechanical tuning fork to vibrate and places the tuning fork on the joint or nail of the patient's foot. Then, the medical staff asks the patient whether he/she can sense the vibration. If the patient cannot feel the vibration, the medical staff reads the scale shown on the mechanical tuning fork. If the scale is greater than or equal to 5, then the patient's vibration perception is normal, however, if the scale is less than 5 or no vibration at all, then the patient's vibration perception is abnormal.
However, when using a mechanical tuning fork for testing a patient's vibration perception, the medical staff must read the scale on the mechanical tuning fork with their naked eyes, causing the result of the test to be subjective, the data (e.g., reading the scale) may be prone to error and misjudgments may occur. In addition, traditional mechanical tuning forks may be limited to the medical staff with measurement experience, and therefore cannot be performed by a lay person, such as family members or friends of diabetic patients to help perform the test on the diabetes patients at home.